Why does this seem to you to be your last effort in the form we call the novel?
Two things Irish-Americans are good at are leaving things behind and lingering goodbyes. It is true, as you know, that I’ve taken to calling this “my last novel,” not out of any fatalist impulses but because I’m not writing at present and no longer certain why I should. Maybe that will pass, but it’s not anything I’ve ever experienced before. I grow old but as yet do not wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled, although dad jeans are another thing (and the grow old allusion seals its own deal). Maybe Prufrock will make a comeback, for as in his era some of my valedictory feeling surely results from the way that the general malaise, the constant pummeling I spoke of before, saps any imagination not to say vision. We are all too weary of the current horror story where an obscene clown face and bulbous twitter-finger mocks Adorno’s notion of barbarism and Arendt’s banality of evil. Meanwhile the slime oozes from the gutter into the streets of Chemnitz and Charlottesville, the polar caps melt, and the children are torn from their parents and caged. It is hard to think, let alone sing, and the general attack on any sort of truth (constant noise being the center of the struggle in Remedia) makes even this complaint sound false to its maker. Beckett’s, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” begins to feel too high a standard unless one attempts it in silence.
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